


Six Different Ways

by Zippa6



Series: Where She Most Satisfies [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, M/M, Masturbation, Pining, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-24
Updated: 2019-05-24
Packaged: 2020-03-13 09:39:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18938308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zippa6/pseuds/Zippa6
Summary: Six scenes from the lives of Kylo Ren and Armitage Hux, showing how their bond is formed, tested, and restrengthened — and the role one woman plays in it. Told from Hux's first-person point of view.Please read the notes for context. Thanks for reading!





	Six Different Ways

**Author's Note:**

> This one-shot is set in my _[Where She Most Satisfies](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1126554)_ AU, which features my original character Mira Galan. The sixth scene is the only part that overlaps with it and takes place within [Chapter 40](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14346048/chapters/36229845#workskin) of _Putting the Damage On_.

#### One

The first time I saw him, he seemed little more than a petulant boy. He wore a tattered homespun tunic and smelled of ashes. Breathing hard, his shoulders rising and falling, brushing against the ends of his dark hair. Hands clutched into fists. His eyes were wild and frightened when he turned them on me, and I returned what I hoped was a cool, assessing gaze.

Snoke had summoned me to his audience room in the _Absolution_ from my chambers, which I was still getting used to calling my own and not my father’s. He hadn’t told me why, and so when I approached Snoke, the boy standing at the foot of the broad black stairs that ascended to the throne like a ziggurat surprised me. The Praetorian Guard flanked the staircase, one on every three steps, seemingly impassive in their featureless red armor, their never-seen faces hidden behind smooth kertosis plastoid.

“Colonel Hux,” Snoke said — I was not yet a general then — “this is my apprentice, Kylo Ren. You will see to it that he has all he desires.”

I swallowed hard, forcing myself to keep down, even in my thoughts — for Snoke was able to hear those — the wave of indignation. A colonel, serving some child not even part of the First Order. The Commandant would have thought me brought low, indeed.

But my father was dead.

The figure I had to obey and loathe in equal measure now was the one who sat stiffly on the tall, angular throne at the zenith of the ziggurat. I forced myself to look at him, and his malformed, sunken-in skull, his hideous scar that seamed his face, the sickly gray skin. He wore a decadent robe of cloth-of-gold that hid his body entirely, but I knew it to be frail and ailing. If he stood, he pressed hard into the arms of the throne to push himself up and his spindly form, more than two meters tall, moved in a stooped shuffle.

But I had seen what he could do with just his will, seen men thrown across the room, dead before they hit the floor. Seen them beg for their lives beforehand, and the terror in their faces dissolve into hopelessness, resignation. They died without dignity, without pride.

I didn’t understand Snoke’s Force powers, but I understood this: the power of inspiring fear, of being known to never give mercy.

This apprentice of his I eyed warily now. Was he capable of the same? Perhaps not yet. I quickly tried to banish a thought from my mind at that moment — the thought that I would have to dispatch this apprentice someday, sooner better than later, before he learned too much.

My effort to clear my mind was too late. The boy turned to me, and his eyes were dark in the way a smoldering fire is. In a way that matched the smell of smoke emanating from him. His face was smudged with ash, and the plain robe he wore was burned through on the right shoulder.

But as I gazed back at him, his eyes changed. They were still dark, but instead of burning they were almost pleading. I saw in them what I saw in my own eyes. A desperate desire to please. Not just Snoke — someone, anyone. And at that moment, _anyone_ included me.

#### Two

His face became a mask. His eyes, which had been disarmingly open, were now behind black durasteel. Instead of the pale tan tunic he now wore rough black robes that fluttered around his legs and feet when he moved.

And I watched him move. As I went about my duties on the _Absolution_ , I’d see him and pause. Perhaps he would be training with the other Knights of Ren — all similarly masked and cloaked. They would attack him — all six at once and no holding back.

He would charge through them with blows from his sparring weapon, kicks with his large, booted feet — and with the same Force power I’d seen Snoke use. A gesture, and they’d be flung across the room or pulled toward him for a strike. He was fearsome, a juggernaut of a man — grown broader and stronger since he was the boy who first came to the _Absolution_.

I knew that strength first-hand. The first time, I was summoned to Snoke’s audience chamber for some infraction — a stormtrooper training quota not yet met — and I found him there standing beside the throne.

“Apprentice,” Snoke said, “show Colonel Hux how we regard failure.”

“Yes, Master,” he replied.

And he strided to me, posture straight, giving no clue to what he thought or felt. What would his face have told me in this moment, and others like it? I haven’t yet asked him.

But then, he stood in front of me, his mask close to my face, its vocoder distorting the sound of his breath. That was a clue — it came fast and heavy, as if the prospect of what he was going to do aroused some emotion in him. I didn’t know which it was, then.

And then he hit me. The back of his gloved hand against my cheek. The sting of leather on skin, the taste of blood.

I stared at him then, suppressing the shudder that always threatened to wrack my body when we were so close to each other. I licked the blood from my lip, watching him. Without a word, he turned back to Snoke, who laughed.

“Well done, Apprentice,” the Supreme Leader said. “We’ll do what his father could not manage. We’ll break this cur yet.”

#### Three

I didn’t see his face again for nearly two years after he arrived. I found him in the corridor as we both were returning to our quarters for our sleep cycles. Snoke had synced our schedules by then, making sure we spent as much time in each other’s company as possible — for what purpose except to torment both of us, I didn’t know. But sometimes we spoke, and sometimes for a moment, we could forget the strings that Snoke had on both of us. Only for a moment, however.

He had been away on a mission that day, and his robes were still soaked through and spattered with mud up to his knees. His boots were encrusted with it, too — and not just mud. Blood and gobs of gore had dried on the toes. I didn’t need to wonder what had happened. I had seen his lightsaber ignited by then — a crackling length of red shot through with crossbars venting plasma.

This he took out now and began to rain blows on the durasteel bulkhead. Sparks sprayed around him, blue and orange and white, as if he were being showered with light. Each slash left a livid seam in the durasteel. I wondered — were all lightsabers capable of such destruction or only in the hands of someone like him?

His frustrated growling seemed far away through the distortion of his mask, and this might have frustrated him further, for he stood panting for a moment, lightsaber still ignited, and then pulled off his helmet. It took a moment for the hydraulic seal to release, and then he tugged it off and threw it to the floor, where it clattered and landed on its side, spinning.

He looked up and saw me then, and his eyes were full of pain and anger. The red glow reflected in them as he raised his weapon.

I thought it was going to be when he finally killed me. What else had Snoke been working toward but this? Snoke had created a strange bond between us, and what better lesson for his apprentice than to sever it with a stroke of his lightsaber?

I was determined not to flinch. “Ren.”

His face was distorted in his rage, his teeth gritted, eyebrows drawn together. His dark hair hung in his face, lank and damp. He looked years older like this, with a fury that went far deeper than could have penetrated in just his 25 standard years.

He drew in a slow, shaking breath, and then lowered and deactivated his lightsaber. I saw too now that dried blood covered his gloves and flaked off onto the shiny black floor as he flexed his hand.

“Hux,” he replied. He sighed heavily and his face softened, his eyes seeming to search out what he could say to me and receive understanding in return.

“Did your mission go badly?” I dared to ask, hoping to draw him out — for what reason, I didn’t know.

His hand balled into a fist again. He clenched his jaw. “No,” he said. “It went exactly as it was supposed to.”

 

#### Four

The beacon came from his belt. My life’s work was collapsing around me — but not before Starkiller had performed its function. Perfectly, irrevocably. The red beam of my weapon had pierced the galaxy, and the ferocity of triumph was still in my veins.

But Snoke had sent me after him. To save him from whatever fate he’d thrown himself into — the map he was so obsessed with, the girl who had escaped him. Distractions. The First Order was on the precipice of victory, no matter what the Resistance had managed, and Snoke was sending me into the dark, snowy landscape of a dying planet to fetch his apprentice.

 _Why choose me for this?_ I wanted to ask — but I knew by now not to question Snoke’s motives. It was a test not of my loyalty but of my obedience. And also — Snoke knew that I would not fail.

All around me, the planet was breaking apart, with deafening cracks as fissures opened in the ground. Trees fell, swallowed up. I directed the pilot to land the shuttle in a clearing between two of these fissures, and then headed out into the snow alone.

It was bitterly cold, even with my greatcoat pulled tightly around me. The wind had whipped up in the planet’s dying throes, sending the coat’s hem flapping wildly and driving ice into my face as I ran, following the signal. In the end, however, the trail of blood led me to him as much as his beacon did.

I didn’t know it was his blood until I saw him lying in the snow. I expected to find him seething in his victory, robes frozen, skin hot in the frigid air as he panted, lightsaber still in hand. But he lay on his back, steam rising from the gash on his face, from the bloody mess on his side. His eyes were fixed on the sky, seemingly unseeing. I thought he might be dead — until I saw a bloom of breath rise from his mouth.

I went over to him cautiously. _Wounded animals are dangerous_ , a voice from my past told me. It was the Commandant’s voice. _Don’t you want to be dangerous, Armitage? Or are you the coward everyone thinks you are?_

I stood over him for a moment and he turned his eyes to me, unblinking. The wound on his face was gaping, the edges of it burnt and blackened, the center raw and red to the bone. A stench of singed flesh hung in the air.

“Ren! Get up!” I shouted over the cataclysm of the planet’s destruction — it was like a roar now, like a cry of terror and rage. I could imagine such a roar coming from him.

He didn’t move.

“Goddammit, Ren,” I muttered, to myself, not to him — I knew now that he was insensible to everything but the pain and defeat.

He outweighed me by nearly twenty kilos, but I grabbed him under his arms and pulled. He yelled out, finally returning from whatever trance he had placed himself in. He clutched his bleeding side as I dragged him and then, horribly, began to pound his fist into the wound.

I kicked his hand away. “Ren! Stop! Stop, for fuck’s sake!”

He groaned and then, more horribly, he laughed— a filthy, angry sound. The motion split the gash on his face further and his eyes rolled back into his head. He was ghoulish and pale from blood loss, a man on the verge of death.

I often thought that if he were dead — shot out of his Silencer in space, felled by an enemy he could not dominate, executed by Snoke for an unforgivable hesitation — then no one would know of my humiliations, of my weakness when we’d leave Snoke’s chambers and I’d press my fingertips to my eyes; when I’d leave the bridge for yet another stimshot and he’d see me later, during what should have been our sleep cycle, trembling with weariness that I couldn’t alleviate with rest, as I gazed through a viewport.

But, then, without him, there would be no one in the galaxy who understood me, either.

So I dragged him into the clearing, his dead weight leaving a blood-streaked furrow in the snow. When the shuttle came into view, I called to the pilot to help me. She ran over, but when she saw him, she pulled away, eyes filled with fear. Nobody touched Kylo Ren.

“Take his legs,” I snarled at her. “If he dies, you’ll be lucky if I kill you before the Supreme Leader does.”

I’m not normally so harsh with my officers, but this seemed to be the jolt she needed. She grabbed hold of his boots and lifted, and together we managed to wrestle him onto the shuttle.

I’d given him a painkiller and was wrapping his wounds with bacta bandages as best I could, my hands at once cold from the melting snow and hot from his blood — when his eyes fluttered open and he looked at me with clear eyes, the light on the shuttle making them glow amber.

“General Hux,” he said, his voice raspy. “There’s blood on your hands.”

“Yes,” I said, “there is.”

He groaned and his lids dropped closed again. “You should have left me there,” he said, and then was silent.

 

#### Five

“ _Make_ her,” he said, a growl coming from the shadows of his face, his eyes hidden by a curtain of greasy hair.

He sat in a black chair. It was massive and square, as if quarried from a mine. But the leather upholstery sunk where he dug his ungloved fingers into the arms. I knew from experience how those fingers felt around my wrist, knew the power in those hands. And worse, their power when they did not physically touch me but closed around my throat as if not depriving me merely of air but of life itself.

Despite knowing this, somehow I still felt free enough to scoff at him.

“And how do you propose I do that, Ren?” I asked. “If you compel a woman to agree, she isn’t really saying yes.”

He sneered at me. “What do you know about women? You with your revolving door of technician recruits — do you think they would say _yes_ if you were Armie the Bastard from Arkanis instead of _General Hux of the First Order_?”

I narrowed my eyes but didn’t reply to the particulars of this jab. Whom I shared my bed with was my business, and that of the young men and women themselves. And I treated them well enough that they repaid me in discretion and detachment. And the diminutive of my first name, which he knew I hated, I ignored altogether.

“If that’s the case,” I replied, “then a mere shop girl from Tatooine could hardly refuse the Supreme Leader.”

He clenched his jaw. “She is no _mere_ anything,” he said. “She won’t speak to me. I….“ His voice had broken slightly and he averted his eyes. I saw the twitch in the left one that told me he was suppressing an emotion. “I knew her… before. She’s different. ”

I resisted rolling my eyes in response and instead chose my words carefully. “Ren, in the… _urgency_ of these moments, one can become fixated, not realizing that there are more viable options that will achieve the same objective—”

I held my breath as a small sculpture, made of black glass, flew by my head and hit the wall behind me, shattering.

“ _Goddammit, Hux_.” His breath caught in his gritted teeth. “This is a mission. _She_ is the objective. Not whatever _you_ think this is about.”

I sighed and tried to soothe him. “You’re right, Supreme Leader. I see now that we must treat this as a negotiation. As you know, I am not accustomed to coming to terms, so the initial parlay may not have the desired —”

“Just do whatever it takes,” he said, “to bring her here.”

He stood and walked slowly toward me, each stride of his long, powerful legs deliberate. We faced each other, as we had so many times before. Now, however, his mask, his cowl, the layers of armored clothing, the heavy boots that I had once seen covered in gore — were gone. He wore a black shirt and loose black trousers of thin, rough material. His feet were bare. He had been thus for weeks, watching the First Order slowly succumb to the entropy that threatened it more with each passing cycle. Without his boots, he stood of a height with me, but his breadth was still imposing, even without his cortosis-stiffened tunics. Perhaps even more so, for the muscles of his arms and shoulders were visible through the flimsy fabric, as was, faintly, the scar that formed a slash across his chest.

“But she has to come of her own will,” he said. “Give her whatever she wants in return.”

I nodded. “Yes, Supreme Leader.”

He didn’t dismiss me at once. Instead he leaned closer. His breath was on me, smelling of cassia, a spice he chewed instead of taking stimshots as I did. He let his dark eyes rove over my features, pausing to take in my face, lingering on my mouth. I felt more then saw a tremor in his arm, as if he were suppressing the desire to raise his hand to my lips. I shuddered.

He laughed, bitterly. “Who knows. She might just want _you_ in return.”

I squared my shoulders. _This is a mission_ , I repeated to myself. _You are a general._

But the voice that rose above mine, that came from a place deeper within me, was that of the Commandant. _If I had but lived to see my name raised so high, boy,_ it sneered. _General Hux, pimp to the Supreme Leader. Will you let him make you a eunuch as well? Or perhaps he has some use for those balls you’re not using. Once he’s tired of this girl he might give you your wish and make you his whore instead of his whoremonger._

The Supreme Leader was first to look away,  but not before his tongue darted between his lips — obscenely full and red — and passed quickly over their surface, leaving his mouth wet.

 

#### Six

I told myself as I looked out into the garden at the Gaian Senate Palace that I was looking at her. And I was. I saw her bare knees under the garden’s fairy lights, jutting from a pulled-up skirt, stockings pushed down under her knees. I had seen those bare knees many times, had pressed my lips to them.

And I saw then that he did the same with his red, full mouth, before he parted her knees farther, before I saw the muscles working under the bare, pale skin of his buttocks as he thrust into her. And I saw the way she moved and gripped the blanket that they lay on and recognized it from what she did when she was under me.

I wasn’t witnessing a betrayal, however it may sound. I knew she spread her legs for him, that she straddled him with her thighs squeezed around his hips, that he kissed her so passionately that he left bruises and teeth marks on her neck, her arms, her breasts, the insides of her thighs.

I had thought that I was the betrayal until just two weeks before. Before I knew I was a means. And yet I loved her, and my cock went hard thinking of his mouth on hers, where my mouth had once been.

I had it in one hand, my tumbler of whiskey in the other, as I watched them fuck in the garden, and I didn’t know which of them I wished I were.

Then I realized — I could be both.

With a jolt my arousal mounted, the tension shooting like a blaster bolt through me. I saw her beneath him, her eyes closed, her mouth open. And I saw how he braced his hands in the grass as he moved in her, and how she dug her fingers into the flesh of his back.

I reached my climax as they did, spurting as he took long deep strokes and I could almost hear her crying out through the transparasteel window.

While they lay in the grass in each other’s arms, I stood with my spend running over my hand, panting — until the klaxons began blaring and the strobe lights sweeping across the landscape. I saw them both jump to their feet and run, then saw the glow of their lightsabers — hers green in the center and turned amber at the edges, his the familiar red sparks and crackles.

I set down my tumbler and took a handkerchief out of my pocket, cleaned myself with a practiced efficiency. Then I had my cock back in my trousers and my blaster in my hand. I strode out of the room, ready to face danger by their sides.


End file.
